The quality of learning is strained

April 6 2003

Brendan Nelson is planning what will be the biggest shake-up in higher education since 1988. But it won't be easy, writes Michelle Grattan.

When Brendan Nelson was studying medicine at Flinders University he was taught endocrinology by Ian Chubb. Now Nelson is Education Minister and Chubb is vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, as well as a past president of the influential Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee.

Within weeks, when Nelson unveils a sweeping set of reforms to set the course of Australia's university system for a decade, Chubb will again be "marking" the performance of his one-time student.

His standards will be tough. Among the vice-chancellors, Chubb has been critical. His bottom line is that "we can't have a single solution that revolves around charging students (more) - because they already pay enough, if not too much. The solution has to be more sophisticated than that simple and unproductive approach".

The ambitious Nelson is heading into the most testing time of his political career. He's been touted as a possible future deputy leader under Costello (although the competition is very strong). How his higher education reforms go down with universities, business and the interested public, and whether he can get them through the Senate, will be crucial to whether Nelson continues his trajectory of success. ");document.write("

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The reform package, expected to be unveiled in the budget, is also important for the Government generally. It has had to defer its work and family measures, so apart from higher education this budget is light on the domestic front. (The Government will announce changes to Medicare before the budget but those are driven by the need to protect its flank.) The education package can be paraded as an achievement on what many have said is a flagging reform agenda.

Nelson's overhaul will be the biggest shake-up since Labor Education Minister John Dawkins' highly controversial 1988 restructuring, merging the system of vocationally based colleges of advanced education into the university system. Dawkins' changes aimed to flatten the distinction between tertiary institutions. Nelson's package - with modest extra dollars initially but about $1 billion over four years - is about encouraging and making a virtue of differentiation between universities.

Last year Ian Macfarlane, Reserve Bank governor, told a conference sponsored by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research and The Australian that assessments by Melbourne University's vice-chancellor Alan Gilbert and others that Australia no longer had a university in the world's top 100 suggested that although "Australia has greatly progressed in the breadth of its education system, the same is untrue about the depth".

The remedy, Macfarlane said, "may involve overthrowing conventions that attempt to impose uniformity. It may elicit the old catchcry of 'elitism', but far better that, than a complacency permitting higher education to slip further".

The needs driving the Nelson package are clear; the political reception is yet to be seen. The charges will deregulate the universities, although not totally. They will be allowed to charge above or below the standard HECs fees, but only within limits.

This will swing the system further in a market-based direction - an acknowledgement that if higher education is to expand and improve as much as is needed, it can't just rely on the taxpayers to put in the extra dollars. There will be more full fee-paying places and a new student loan scheme.

Funding arrangements will encourage the "elite" universities to compete in research with the world's best. On the other hand, there will be incentives for some universities, especially those in regional areas, to concentrate on teaching and to stream what research they do into very specialised areas.

There will be "carrots". The income threshold at which HECS repayments kick in - now about $24,000 - will be lifted. The carrots are partly directed at the Senate. The last thing Nelson wants is for reform to founder before it even starts.

Unlike many critics, Nelson does not claim the universities are in crisis. Rather, he has been arguing that without change, they're on a "collision course with mediocrity" - that the system won't perform at its best, or meet Australia's 21st century needs, while the 38 public universities are all funded and administered on the one model. Melbourne University and Ballarat University aren't the same and shouldn't be treated so.

The present system, in Nelson's view, spreads resources too thinly. For example, 20 per cent of units on offer have fewer than five students. Nelson will present his plan as measured change - pushing the rudder to get the boat to shift direction but not so suddenly that the passengers are pitched over the side.

A veteran of medical politics (he was Australian Medical Association president) before he got into the real thing, Nelson has been careful to consult widely and not to rush. He's given special attention to the vice-chancellors who are signed up to the idea of more flexible HECs and also to looking increasingly outside the public system for funds.

"We have to live with a mixed budget - Australia can't go back to the joys of the Whitlam days in which there was free, fully government-funded education," says Deryck Schreuder, president of the AVCC. "That would be an ideal but it is unlikely to ever happen again. So we must invest as much as we can afford in public education and look to other ways of supporting a higher education system of quality and international excellence."

The AVCC has told the Government that by 2020 Australia should raise its spending on its university sector from 1.4 per cent of GDP to 2 per cent; boost the proportion of the population who go through higher education from about 45 per cent to 60 per cent; have at least one world-class research centre in every major discipline; and aim to make higher education one of the country's top three service exports.

Higher education is increasingly viewed as a core economic issue - a driver of economic growth, international competitiveness, and exports. It is our eighth-largest export ("we've passed the sheep," says Schreuder), and brings in $4.6 billion annually. Australia teaches 140,000 foreign students offshore or onshore, and it is estimated that this could grow to 1 million by 2025.

Not surprisingly, business has been heavily involved in the review. Heather Ridout, the Australian Industry Group's deputy CEO, a member of Nelson's advisory reference group, urges much more collaboration between business and universities.

Universities should be allowing business in "as a full partner" in a relationship where there is a "seamless" exchange of talent and ideas, she says. For instance, they should have a flexible approach that allows business people to routinely go in to teach, rather than giving "guest" lectures. She points to the greater level of business involvement in the United States.

An Ai Group survey of 560 companies that invest in R&D revealed that only 12 per cent co-operated with universities in doing their research, with another 3 per cent co-operating with a combination of universities and CSIRO.

But John Hay, University of Queensland vice-chancellor, turns the argument back on business. "The amount of money going into university research from the business sector is lower than in competitive OECD nations. Although the trend of business support is up, it is still declining relative to them," he says.

Hay believes the Nelson package is "going down the right path" in embracing differentiation. "It is not possible to have 38 epicentres of intensive research. Everything doesn't have to occur everywhere - it is not realistic." And it doesn't occur this way overseas. Hay points to the US where top students from liberal arts colleges, which do little or no research, move on to graduate-level research in universities such as Harvard and Yale.

Even with the present undifferentiated system, the eight major universities do three-quarters of the universities' research, Hay says. (And universities do 84 per cent of Australia's basic research).

Hay's worry is that the extra funding may not be enough to give the boost that the research infrastructure desperately needs. The universities collectively will have access to more income from fees, but these are already comparatively high, limiting the scope for raising more money - and the Government's financial injection may not match requirements.

But Hay warns the Senate against "cherry picking", which could "unravel" the package, losing the benefits that it will provide.

The universities package will be almost as much a test for Labor and spokeswoman Jenny Macklin as for Nelson. When Macklin dined with the vice-chancellors in February, they pressed her to state a position on the plan ahead of time. She declined to make any commitment, but she set out the case for greater public investment, and reiterated ALP opposition to deregulating fees and its intention to scrap upfront fees.

Education is Labor's natural ground, and it is always easy to knock changes that will see some students accumulating more debt. But a Labor government couldn't afford to get all the money the universities need from the taxpayers. The question for the ALP is: where would it find enough funds to improve the system if it limits its sources?